“Beat Bop”: Hip-Hop and World-Building in 1980s Downtown New York

Listening to the 1983 hip-hop single “Beat Bop” 40 years after its recording is an act of retroactive discovery. It feels like climbing to the top of a mountain and seeing the future from the perspective of the future. 

“Beat Bop” features solid representation of early hip-hop rhymes courtesy of a then 15-year old battle rapper named K-Rob alongside the work of graffiti artist and rapper Rammellzee, who turns the flows inside out, transforms solids to liquids, reverses the poles, and shows mirrors reflections of themselves for the first time. 

“Beat Bop” was released 1983 on the Tartown label which was operated by the artist and sometime musician Jean-Michel Basquiat. He also produced the song. In fact, the original intention of what was to become “Beat Bop” was to be a showcase for Basquiat as a rapper. He and Rammellzee had a frenemy-type relationship, which had started in the world of graffiti. After those early days, Basquiat had grown in stature through the attention of the moneyed/white art world. That may have built resentment among the graffiti community. In his all-encompassing and illuminating book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, Jeff Chang writes that “Rammellzee shared many [graffiti] writers’ opinions that because Basquiat had never hit a train, he was a fake.”

If Basquiat  knew about this belief, it didn’t stop him from incorporating Rammellzee into two of his paintings along with another fellow graffiti artist Toxic: Hollywood Africans in front of the Chinese Theater with Footprints of Movie Stars (1983) and Hollywood Africans (1983). Basquiat certainly viewed the two as peers, working together within the same artistic community. This association started out in a visual milieu, but soon extended into music. Critic Jefferson Mao wrote that “Beat Bop” was the result of “a battle of one-upmanship” between Rammellzee and Basquiat “that eventually extended from challenges within one disciple of hip-hop culture, graffiti, to another — rhyming.”

The inspiration for the music that would serve as a backdrop for Basquiat and Rammellzee’s rapping included a surprising figure. As quoted in Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music, Toxic said:

“Madonna was staying at Jean’s place while he was in LA. I was there with my friends Trace and General EMC. She let us up … I was playing the drum machine and Madonna started playing the keyboard. My friend started emceeing. We took Jean’s turntable and scratched. Jean heard the tape.”

Unfortunately, Madonna did not go on to play in the group that Basquiat formed for the session. Instead, it included Al Diaz on percussion, a funky, shuffling scratch guitar sound from Sekou Bunch, and Eszter Balint, who provided the haunting, recurring violin part that helps “Beat Bop” feel as if it was recorded in the darkest part of the city during the darkest part of the night.

The following year, Rammellzee and Balint would appear together in Stranger Than Paradise, as director Jim Jarmusch pulled many figures from New York’s downtown scene for his film. They shared a scene that features classic Jarmusch-ian themes of mistaken identity and missed chances, resulting in unexpected opportunity:

Back to “Beat Bop”: the groove of the song is similar in feel to the music of Liquid Liquid, another early 80s New York City band. Compare “Beat Bop” with “Lock Groove (Out)” which was recorded two years before:

The two songs share a similar set-the-controls-for-the-heart-of-the-black-hole vibe. Diaz, who helped Basquiat to assemble the band for “Beat Bog” also played in Liquid Liquid. This connection — like Rammellzee and Balint appearing together in Stranger Than Paradise — demonstrates the fluid nature of the downtown scene. Collaboration was an essential component of that time and place, in which the participants produced work that fused mediums together, whether it was painting, graffiti, hip-hop, dance, film, or trance music.

Though Basquiat wanted “Beat Bop” to showcase his own rhyming, as soon as the session began, Rammellzee and K-Rob had other ideas, according to Spin’s essential piece “Basquiat’s ‘Beat Bop’: An Oral History of One of the Most Valuable Hip-Hop Records of All Time.” K-Rob recounted:

“Ramm came through with a trench coat and dark black shades on, looking like Inspector Gadget… Jean introduced us, and he gave us some papers to read. I can’t remember what it [said], but it was so far-fetched. It was some corny shit. Me and Ramm looked at it like, ‘Get a load of this motherfucking guy! Really?’”

Rammellzee’s recollection also shows that he and K-Rob were in agreement about Basquiat’s rhyming:

“We crushed up his paper with the words he had written down and we threw it back at him, face first.” 

If Basquiat was upset by their usurpation of his own project, he did not get in the way, allowing K-Rob and Rammellzee to move forward on their own. In the Spin oral history, Rammellzee remembered how the two assumed characters for the song:

“Then we said, ‘We’re gonna go in these two booths,’ and [I said], ‘I’m gonna play pimp on the corner,’ and K-Rob said, ‘I’ll play schoolboy coming home from school,’ and then it went on.”

K-Rob starts the song off. His opening verse, like the rest of his rhymes on the track, are contemplative about life in New York City:

Everybody’s turning crazy so you’d better believe
To do the right things or soon you’ll see
Life ain’t a moral joke it’s a serious thing
When you’re dealing with the answers that you can’t explain
New York City is a place of mysteries
Drug addicts dope dealers taking over the streets
That me is always saying why the hell do we pay?
What for they break the laws and get a couple of days.

How does Rammellzee respond? 

MC quick just to make your peanut butter
Shock with the rhythm of a number one undercover
Break it up just shake it up rodeo uh.

K-Rob is all realism, whereas Rammellzee is a voice from outer space. Another unforgettable aspect of “Beat Bop” is the pervasive use of reverb on each of their vocals. The effect fades in during the course of a rhyme as if the rapper had suddenly been transported to an empty water tower and subsequently returned to the studio. The writer Hua Hsu said of “Beat Bop: “There’s so much echo and reverb on the track that it sounds like an attempt at time travel.” This device adds to the surrealistic feel of the song, especially Rammellzee’s lines as he plays with the sound of each words:

Just hip-hop the day they doo-be-doo
Yeah Scooby Doo what you wanna do crew

and

Like a iconoclast had your rhythm to the stick
Just a rock on like the finger lick
Finger popping hop popping now don’t stop bunny rock
Bunny rock and you don’t stop

and

Just make you freak when a panny wanny with clip
Got the little pat to the dab’ll make you my hip.

It sounds as if K-Rob is trying to interject and re-enter throughout. Rammellzee steamrolls him away. K-Rob confirmed to Spin that this was the case:

“You know how rappers [now] go in and say, ‘Yo, you do your take, and I do my take?’ Nah, it wasn’t like that. It was two microphones set up in the same room. [At one point] Ramm was hogging the mic, and you can hear me in the background like, ‘Eh, haha,’ ’cause I’m like, ‘Yo, Ramm, you rapping too motherfucking much — let me get back in!’”

In addition to dominating the microphone, it’s also evident that Rammellzee is pushing forward the language of hip-hop into previously unknown areas, recontextualizing the words through the emphasis of pure sound. He forces juxtapositions for the sake of a rhyme rather than aligning them to previous hip-hop conventions. Examples include:

He can get real ill when you’re on the chill
I like the quarter drop a dime
That can make you seek a thrill
Master killer called the Evil Griller
Yes the best in the nation yeah number one thriller
I’m the best cut, rocking with the duck
Making with the conceal.

Or:

I like a DD the hopping with the BB
King of the mike a like a mike controller see
Get on the freak a like a little dick dick
You’re rocking hard with kid unique
Like disco Patty Duke uh I don’t stop
Patty Duke played out the hitting the top
I break a rock grandmaster hip a joint up shock it up
Check it out you don’t stop.

“Beat Bop” is the beginning of Rammellzee’s lifelong mission to transform language, or, as Hsu wrote in the same New Yorker piece, “His hope wasn’t to replace English; he wanted to annihilate it from the inside out.” The following quote from Rammellzee to writer Greg Tate supports Hsu’s assertion: 

“All my art and all my teachings are about Gothic Futurism…and the knowledge of how a letter aerodynamically changes into a tank. I tell people, phonetic value does not apply to any letter’s structure because the sound is made by the bone structure of the human species, which has nothing to do with the integer structure quality. The letter is an integer. Chinese letters are carbonetic, but ours are siliconic. Arabic symbols are disease – cultural chemical symbols. They cannot be armoured. They cannot be made Ikonoklast. They cannot be made into a vehicle in motion. Silicon based symbols can be moved forward and have no phonetic value. What they’re saying in Arabic equals the structure of the symbol. What we’re saying does not equal structure, but the difference in values between silicon and carbon.”

It’s difficult to parse these assertions and connections to find an applicable meaning. As Jarmusch once said of Rammellzee, “He’s a genius. The kind of guy you could talk to for 20 minutes and your whole life would change. If you could only understand him.”

A historical antecedent for Rammellzee’s philosophy is dadaism, which sought the destruction of language and symbols to reflect the meaningless of life. For example, take these lines from the 1919 poem “Anna Blume” by German artist Kurt Schwitters:

What colour is the bird?
Blue is the color of your yellow hair.
Red is the cooing of your green bird.

These lines sound as if they could have been delivered by Rammellzee in “Beat Bop.” In the song, his rhymes undercut the meaning of words to force something new. What are these new definitions? That’s beside the point. Meaning can come later. 

After the song was recorded, Tartown released only 500 copies, though it featured Basquiat art on the sleeve. According to Diaz, Basquiat shifted his attention to other projects once “Beat Bop” was out in the world:

“It was a side project for Jean, and I think, after a point, he lost a little interest in it. I remember going up to Crosby Street, and seeing boxes and boxes of the record just sitting around.”

After the initial limited run, Basquiat sold the rights to another label and “Beat Bop” had a new life, melting into the subconscious of hip-hop fans. The impact and legacy of the song with other artists was both overt and subtle. There’s a moment towards the end of “Beat Bop” at the 8:34 mark that the Beastie Boys sampled, featuring Rammellzee’s nasally-delivered lines. It became the hook for the third song on 1994’s Ill Communication, “B-Boys Makin’ with the Freak Freak”:

The sound, flow, delivery, and alien persona of Rammellzee can be heard in the rapping of many artists. Examples include Kool Keith’s alternate character Dr. Octagon, who is a “homicidal, extraterrestrial, time-traveling gynecologist and surgeon”:

MF DOOM draws on Rammellzee’s surrealism and flow, which results in a continual delight in language rather than Rammellzee’s urge for destruction. Regardless, DOOM can sound an awful lot like Rammellzee:

Several members of Wu Tang Clan seem to channel Rammellzee. One example is the title track from GZA’s nightmarish 1995 album Liquid Swords:

Each of these artists are creators of their own worlds which are made up of complicated and unique sets of imagery, iconography, and rules. They are indebted to Rammellzee and the example he set in visionary world-building. Of course, Rammellzee wasn’t alone in the creation of  “Beat Bop” as K-Rob and all of the musicians who contributed to the track need to be recognized. Ultimately, it was Basquiat who was the instigator behind this particular collaborative artwork. A world builder himself, Basquiat was the shooting star of this community, rising, exploding, and gone much too soon.

“Beat Bop” is a seminal work. Despite its surrealist humor, it reveals artists reaching out to each other in the dark of the night, utilizing different rapping approaches and combining vital sensibilities of the downtown New York artistic community to achieve a glorious black hole of a song. “Beat Bop” launched a thousand ships on the seas of hip-hop.

Image: The original test pressing feature art designed by Jean-Michel Basquiat.